European Study Paints a Chilling Portrait of Technology's Uses

By BRUNO GIUSSANI

A massive telecommunications interception network operates within Europe
and, according to a new study circulating on the Internet, "targets the
telephone, fax and e-mail messages of private citizens, politicians, trade
unionists and companies alike."

The report says that the network has the ability to tap into almost all
international telecommunications as well as parts of domestic phone traffic
 and is apparently operated by intelligence agencies without any mechanism
of democratic control.

The network, dubbed Echelon, is described in a new study by the
European Parliament titled "An Appraisal of Technologies of
Political Control."

The 112-page document, dated January 6, 1998, is considered an internal working
paper and, therefore, has not been posted on the parliament's own Web server.
While paper copies of the report have been made public, in the last three
weeks, it has begun to be reproduced on the Internet by civil liberties advocates
and is now available from several Web sites.

The report was written by Steve Wright, an analyst with the Omega Foundation,
a British human rights organization, on behalf of a research unit of the
European Parliament known as STOA (Scientific and Technological Options
Assessment). [The European Parliament is the legislative body of the
European Union (EU), an economic and political alliance of
15 countries.]

According to the report, in the last few years many governments have spent
huge sums on the development of new technologies  from surveillance
systems to paralyzing weapons  for their police and security forces.

While the adoption of these technologies may have legitimate law enforcement
functions and may be relatively harmless when accompanied by strong regulation
and accountability mechanisms, "without such democratic controls they provide
powerful tools of oppression," the report states. Outmatched by the speed
and complexity of technological innovation, the fear is that these controls
have been quickly weakening in recent years.

The rapid and unchecked proliferation of surveillance devices among both
the private and public sector presents today "a serious threat to civil liberties
in Europe" and could have "awesome implications," the document stresses.

Drawing from sources as diverse as academia, intelligence agencies and
non-governmental organizations, the STOA study offers a rare description
and evaluation of the technologies of political control  what it calls
weaponry aimed "as much at hearts and minds as at body."

This includes electronic surveillance systems; data gathering, processing
and filtering devices; biometric and other human identity recognition tools;
so-called "less-lethal" weapons for crowd control; new prison control systems,
and torture and execution techniques.

One core trend identified by Wright has been "towards a militarisation of
the police and a paramilitarisation of military forces in Europe," meaning
that the technologies used by police and the army converge and become "more
or less indistinguishable."

This "parallels a political shift in targeting," the report adds. Instead
of investigating crime (which is a reactive activity) law enforcement agencies
are now increasingly "tracking certain social classes and races of people
living in the red-lined areas before any crime is committed"  a form
of pre-emptive policing dubbed "data-veillance" and based on military models
of gathering huge amounts of low-grade intelligence and digging out deviant
patterns.

Electronic surveillance technology, the systems that can monitor the movements
of individuals and their communications, "is one of the areas where outdated
regulations have not kept pace with an accelerating pattern of abuses" by
law enforcement agencies and private companies, Wright says in the report.

The report paints a frightening picture of an Orwellian world. For example,
it states that Britain has set up the first DNA databank, and at least one
political party is suggesting "to DNA-profile the nation from birth."
Face-recognition systems "are perhaps five years off." Parabolic and laser
microphones can detect distant conversation, even behind closed windows.
Stroboscopic cameras can individually photograph all the participants in
a march.

Among the more futuristic scenarios portrayed in the study, robots called
neural network bugs, built like small cockroaches, can crawl to the best
location for surveillance. Researchers are now working on controlling and
manipulating real cockroaches by implanting microprocessors and electrodes
in their bodies. "The insects can be fitted with micro-cameras and sensors
to reach the places other bugs can't reach," Wright says.

Cameras used for traffic monitoring can easily be adapted to security
surveillance. "Democratic accountability is the only criterion which
distinguishes a modern traffic control system from an advanced dissident
capture technology," Wright states, adding that several companies have been
exporting traffic control devices to Lhasa in Tibet recently.

"Lhasa does not as yet have any traffic control problem," he adds.

The most explosive section of the report discusses the Echelon system.

As Wright describes it, this global surveillance machine "stretches around
the world to form a targeting system on all of the key Intelsat satellites
used to convey most of the world's satellite phone calls, Internet traffic,
e-mail, faxes and telexes," according to the report. Unlike many of the
electronic spy systems developed during the cold war, Echelon "is designed
primarily for non-military targets: governments, organisations and businesses
in virtually every country."

Wright says the system works by indiscriminately intercepting industrial
quantities of communications and then siphoning out what could be valuable,
using artificial intelligence aids and keywords searches. Dictionaries of
keywords, phrases and people are defined by each of the five countries
participating in network: the United States, Britain, Canada, New Zealand
and Australia, yet the main actor appears to be the United States National
Security Agency.

"Within Europe, all e-mail, telephone and fax communications are routinely
intercepted by the NSA," the report charges, acknowledging that while there
is much information gathered about potential terrorists through such methods,
there is a lot of economic intelligence that gets caught, as well.

Wright also reports that in 1995 the EU states signed a memorandum of
understanding (which remains classified) to set up a new international telephone
tapping network.

The document apparently reflects concerns among European intelligence agencies
that modern scrambling and coding technology could prevent them from tapping
private communications. The EU governments agreed to cooperate closely on
this issue with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, "yet early minutes of
these meetings suggest that the original initiative came from Washington,"
Wright's report says.

Under the agreement, he says, "Network and service providers in the EU will
be obliged to install 'tappable' systems and to place under surveillance
any person or group when served with an interception order."

These plans have "never been subject to proper parliamentary discussion [in
Europe]," Wright stresses. He suggests that the time has now arrived to bring
much of this technology back within the reach of democratic supervision and
accountability.

The basic assumption behind the deployment of these technologies of political
control is that they enhance policing capacities and allow a faster response
time and a greater cost-effectiveness in fighting crime.

In addition, some people feel that only those with something to hide need
to fear the enlarged data-gathering capacities of police computers.

Yet the bookkeeping and paternalistic approach of the phenomenon cannot be
satisfying in democratic societies. There is a pressing need to determine
the extent to which these new technologies are about political and social
control rather than citizen protection, the report says.

"Explicit and publicly available criteria should be agreed upon for deciding
who should be targeted for surveillance and who should not, how such data
is stored, processed and shared," Wright writes.

"The European parliament should reject proposals from the United States for
making private messages via the Internet accessible to U.S. intelligence
agencies," he adds. Nor should it agree on new encryption controls without
considering "the civil and human rights of European citizens and the commercial
rights of companies to operate without unwarranted surveillance by
intelligence agencies operating in conjunction with multinational competitors"
 an obvious reference to American agencies, which are often perceived
as sharing collateral economic intelligence with U.S. companies.

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